The tool is called "Hydan," an old English word for the act of hiding something, and it's part of a research project by Columbia University computer science masters student Rakan El-Khalil, who showed off the program to a small group of open-source programmers and hackers gathered at the second annual CodeCon conference in San Francisco on Sunday.
Hydan is a novel development in the field of steganography -- the science of burying secret messages in seemingly innocuous content. Popular stego programs operate on image and music files, where a secret missive can be hidden without altering the content enough to be perceived by human senses. But because they contain instructions for a computer's processor, executable files are less forgiving of tampering. Improperly changing a single bit of executable code can render an application completely unusable.
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